


What Were You Meant For?

by Siamesa



Series: Wrong Side of the Lee [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Jon Snow is a Targaryen, The Night's Watch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-16 15:56:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4631247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siamesa/pseuds/Siamesa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prince Jon Targaryen was not Visenya, is not Aegon, and has had about enough of his father's talk of destiny.  Lord Commander Baratheon, sent to the Night's Watch after the surrender of Storm's End, deals with a new recruit who's carrying a secret.  But winter is coming, and no one can hide forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Were You Meant For?

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Rox in the Box" by The Decemberists.
> 
> And it's one, two, three  
> On the wrong side of the lee  
> What were you meant for?  
> Whatever you're meant for.

 

Jon’s not supposed to enter without knocking- has, in fact, been expressly forbidden- but it’s been twelve hours now.  The food he left outside the door is still there, as cold as stone, and that’s not a good sign.  Lord Commander Baratheon does not waste food.

The door is unlocked, and it opens stiffly at his push.  Jon knows the man wants to be left alone, but the food has only solidified his growing terror that the Lord Commander might be _dead._  

He is not.

Red-rimmed eyes regard Jon balefully over a stack of crumbled papers.  There is an empty goblet overturned on the floor.  The mess is so unlike Baratheon that a dead body might have had Jon less at a loss.

“What do you want?”  There’s less anger in it than Jon might have expected.

“You haven’t eaten.”  It’s familiar ground.  How often has he said it to Aegon, over the years?  “I brought you food.”  The trick with the Lord Commander, like a stubborn horse, is to fake a confidence he doesn’t feel.

Aegon might have protested that he wasn’t hungry.  Baratheon merely snorts, low in his throat, and doesn’t deign to answer.

One paper remains uncrumpled on the desk in front of him.

_My lady,_ it reads.  _Your husband is dead._

Jon knows who it means at once, though he hadn’t known before this instant that Davos Shorthand had a wife.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

There is suddenly life again in the Lord Commander’s eyes.  “Sorry,” he spits, like a foul thing.  “What are you sorry for, pray?”

“The Watch will miss him.”  _I’ll miss him.  You’ll miss him, most of all._

“The _Watch._ ”  This, as though it’s a fouler thing even than Jon’s sympathy.  “His wife and sons will miss him, have missed him all these years.”  Baratheon turns away, his gloved hands clenching and unclenching into fists.

“I told you once what was done to me was justice,” he says, his voice low.  “What was done to him was nothing of the sort.”

“He was a smuggler.”

“Aye, and I would have punished him for that.”  His hands are shaking now.  Bad wine and no food would make a terrible combination for anyone, Jon knows, let alone a man who never drank.  “One man spoke for me.  One man.  Your King Rhaegar never sent him to the wall for smuggling.  He did it because it pricked him, that a man would speak back to a king.”

_Your King Rhaegar._   Jon might risk his cover for his mother’s honor, but he cannot find it within himself to do the same for his father.  Not when he suspects Baratheon might well be speaking the truth.

-

Prince Jon Targaryen, only child of Rheagar’s second Queen, fit nowhere.  His father spoke of destiny, of the Prince who was Promised and the wives who would fight by his side.  _The Dragon must have three heads._ But he was not Visenya.  He was Jon, and he took after his mother’s House far more than his father’s. 

_There must always be a Stark in Winterfell._

But that Stark might have been a newborn babe.  It might have been Benjen.  It was Lyanna’s tears that had set her brother Eddard back onto his ancestral seat, head still on his shoulders while Lord Arryn’s sat a pike.

Jon had been twice to Winterfell.  It was strange and beautiful, with snows even in the summer.  He’d thought, childishly, that those few weeks in the North would prepare him for the Wall.  They had not.  But they had given him the idea.

_The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives._ That was his Lord Uncle’s creed, not quite a prophecy but far more solid.  Eddard would not let Benjen join the Watch, not when they were all that was left of their House.  Benjen, instead, told Jon stories, of daring raids and wildling battles and _things_ that dwelt across the lands of winter.

And slowly, dreams grew into a plan.  

-

“He’s not well,” says Sam.

“He’s… taking it hard.”  Jon likes Sam. He is a friend, a real and honest friend, _Jon Snow’s_ friend.  But the Lord Commander’s secrets are not his to tell.

Truth be told, Jon hasn’t taken Shorthand’s disappearance well either.  He likes the man.  Liked the man.  Quorin is dead, the Ranging is dead, Davos is dead.  Each time men left, Jon had begged to go, to prove his mettle as a Brother.  Every time, he had been refused.  He was made a Steward, and then made the Lord Commander’s squire.

Davos would talk with him, sometimes, and Jon wonders now if he was seeing his sons.  He remembers one talk in particular.

Davos had lost three fingers to frostbite, years ago.  “Three fingers.  Baratheon chopped them, out in the camp, because we’d be out too long to get back to anyone who could do it better.  Same hand, more or less the same knife…”

And Jon had asked: “the same hand?”

Shorthand had smiled, but it was a bitter thing.  “He would have chopped four tips off for smuggling, before he  made me a knight.”  He’d looked down at his maimed hand.  “Fortune’s a funny thing.  Never trust her an inch.”

  _Fate. Destiny._   Jon had shuddered then, and he shudders now.  They’re his father’s things.  They are not his.

-

He wonders, sometimes, what would happen if his brother died.  He wonders how he would find out.  It could be weeks, months after the fact.  It could be never at all.

Aegon could be dead this moment, dead with a brother who never said goodbye.  He could have fallen from a horse, overtaxed his heart in the practice ring, coughed his lungs out in a bed.  The brother who defended him from the Dornish, who laughed at his rare jokes, who never resented Jon his health or his skill or his birth, could be dead or dying, and he might never know.

He finds himself nearly mentioning it one day to Sam, having to force himself to remember that Jon Snow never had a brother.

He’d left for Aegon.

It was a foolish, childish thing to think that maybe, by leaving, he could take all the wrongness away.  That without him there, Visenya-who-wasn’t, to get in the way, destiny could reassert itself.  That the Prince Who Was Promised would grow strong and healthy, out from beneath the shadow of all his little brother was and wasn’t.

-

The battle is images, short and sharp.  His hand on a bow, firing out into the darkness.  There is a brother beside him, and then there is only wind. 

“Giants!” someone yells.  “Giants, bloody giants!”  Edd has something to say, but Jon doesn’t hear it.  Sam is beside him, passing up a full quiver.  His face seems to linger long after he moves on, pale and brave and terrified.

Gates fall, climbers breach.  There are mammoths.

His hand on his sword.  A slash, a stab, a bone wrenching catch on a shield.  The Lord Commander, burning eyes in a shadowed face, screaming out orders that Jon cannot hear.  Pyp’s arm, red and white with frozen blood.  Satin in too-big armor clutching someone else’s knife.

And the woman.

A wildling archer, hair red as flames.  She aims an arrow.  Her eyes meet Jon’s.  His sword meets her throat.  She dies there, dies there staring at his eyes as though she knew him, somewhere, long ago.  As hers dull, he cannot tear his own away. 

-

They hear the horns first, echoing out over the snow.  Then the shouts, and the great mass of men and riders, banners waving, men roaring and howling like beasts.

_Umber_ , for the giant.  _Mormont,_ for the bear.  No sign of wolves or Winterfell.  That would be a relief in itself, but it is dwarfed by a single thought:   _I am alive._   The air is still heavy with blood and smoke.  Jon breathes it in anyway.  _We’re alive.  We’re still alive._

Victory is a heady thing. 

He wonders how his father must have felt, all those years ago, when he smashed the Rebel Stag, when he gave his own honor to kill the Mad King.  He must have written songs.  Not songs to be shared, not songs Jon would ever learn, but he must have sung them to himself in the same way Jon is now whistling bits and pieces of _Lady of the Stars._  

He claps Sam on the back, and finds himself drawn into a quick hug.  “Alive!” says Sam, all higher speech forgotten.

_Alive!_

-

But the Northmen linger.

Jon finds himself in an out-of-the-way storeroom.  He’s brought along a few knives to sharpen, a few bits of armor that need repair, just in case he needs some excuse. 

Jorah Mormont doesn’t ask for one.

“You hiding from your father too, boy?”

Northern lords don’t send their sons to the Wall these days.  Mormont was the one to suggest that Jon might be a Karstark bastard, trying to sound clever, and there’s no else one who knows enough to gainsay him.  Mormont likes to be proved right, and Jon made an offhand mention to him of a sunburst amulet as soon as he remembered what the Karstark sigil was.  He’d said his mother died clutching it.

“Something like that,” he says in reply.

There would have been mention if Lord Eddard had been leading the men, and Stark banners alongside the Mormont bears.  But Benjen might have come, or his eldest cousin.  He can’t take the chance of being recognized.  Robb would tell Lord Eddard, who would be honor-bound to come collect him at once.  Benjen would likely tell _Lyanna._  

Mormont grunts, but says nothing else.  Jon remembers hiding amonst the dragonskulls with Dany as a boy, listening to her build castles in the clouds.  The silence here is heavy in the way their pauses never were.

“Had you ever killed a man before?”  Mormont asks, suddenly.  Jon wonders how much his face had darkened at the old memories, if that’s the cause for the sudden question.

 "No,” he says.  “Not a woman, either.”

Dany had cast them as dragon riders, as warriors in the Conquest.  Jon knows now all the things he never considered then, the smell of burning flesh and the tacky feel of cooling blood.  War must have been easier with a great beast to do your killing for you.

The Northmen leave.  Jon lingers on.

 _

Dany was the only one he’d told.  She was his aunt, but really his sister, in the same way that Rhaenys, who had hardened to him as Elia softened, was more aunt than sister.  Rhaenys was never cruel, and Aegon was his brother, and he loved them both, but it was Dany who he was always closest to. 

“I’m going to join the Night’s Watch,” he said.

She’d just smiled, and grabbed his arm in a soldier’s handshake.  “That’s where you’re going, then?  When you leave?” 

“Promise you won’t tell.  Anyone.  Not even Aegon.  Promise me, Dany.” 

She’d looked at him, iron in her eyes.  “I swear by it by ice and fire, Jon Targaryen.  I swear it by fire and blood.  I _will_ keep your secret.”  And then her eyes had lightened.  “You went to Essos, to be a sellsword, to search for relics of old Valyria.  That’s what they’ll all believe.”  A smile.  “That’s what they’ll all believe when I’m done with them.”

- 

The Lord Commander doesn’t mention his absence.  Jon is told to fetch the best swords in the armory, and so he does, and lays them out on a table in front of Baratheon and (he gulps) Maester Aemon.

“Dragonsteel could kill them, it is said.”

Baratheon’s eyes are dark pits.  He’s been sleeping even less than usual.  “We have no dragonsteel.  We have no dragonglass.  And we have no one down South who will believe the Others rise.”

_No,_ thinks Jon.  _My father would._   The secret creeps up his throat.  

Horns blow.  Everyone stills, but it is only the call for Rangers returning.

_Rangers- returning-_  

- 

There is something to be said for this.  Jon’s smile, he knows, is foolishly soppy.  But after everything- after Pyp and the battle and the Wildling woman who held his eyes as she died- something has gone right.  Someone’s come _back._

Lord Commander Baratheon had gripped Davos’s hand just a bit too tightly, just a second too long.  A Dornishman might have spun him around and kissed him on the lips.  Lord Commander Baratheon had _smiled._

And so Jon waits here, at the bottom of the stairs, half because he left his duties part-finished and half to ward off any man who might be too interested in why the Lord Commander is receiving field reports on his knees.

He misses his family.  He misses warm food and sunny days.  Sometimes, he’s half-afraid that he’s forgotten who he is, that Jon Snow is the truth and Jon Targaryen just a dream he had one night.

But he’s found something like a home here.  Maybe even something like a destiny.  He is no longer the piece that doesn’t fit.  He’s a brother of the Night’s Watch.  Jon would even venture that, right now, he’s happy.

It is two days later that everything goes wrong.

-

They do not send a raven.  They have not stopped at Winterfell.  The first that the Wall knows of the royal party is the sight of riders, black and red banners snapping in the breeze.

Jon’s blood runs cold.

-

_The two men face each other across the room.  Baratheon does not bow, or even incline his head.  Rhaegar ignores his icy glare as he might a buzzing fly._

_“Lord Commander,” he says.  His violet eyes are soft and harmless.  The teeth in his smile are anything but._

_“King Rhaegar.”  The ‘kinslayer’ hangs unspoken in the air between them, lost in the grinding of teeth._

_“Enough pleasantries, I’m sure.  I’ve come for my son.”_

_“Your son.”  If the Lord Commander was expecting the statement, nothing shows in his voice._

_“My younger son.  My Lya’s little boy.” Sometimes he is every bit as mad as his father, this king, in love with songs as Aerys ever was with flame.  Sometimes he is the man, cool and clever, who took a rebellion and used it to save the realm and win his father’s throne._

_Stannis Baratheon’s voice is as cold as the Wall he haunts.  He nods, sharply, to a man just outside the door.  “Fetch me Jon Snow.”_

_-_

Sam finds him first.

In truth, Sam finds him without needing to look.  It’s the dark corner beside Tarly’s own bunk that Jon fled to, with the same instinct that took him to Aegon’s chambers when he fled the Dornish as a boy.  He wonders what has taken his father so long to find him.  He wonders why he has only started looking now.

“Jon?”

He wonders if he’s the first man in the world to have ever flinched away in fear from Samwell Tarly.

“Jon?”

“I’m here,” he answers, weakly.

Sam’s face is round and pale in the darkness.  “I- I can see that.  _Why?_ ”

Sam’s father is a nobleman, but Jon doubts Randyll Tarly ever brought him to court.  “You’re the clever one,” Jon says.  “Haven’t you guessed?”

“Guessed what?  Jon, the _king_ is here.”

“Yes,” says Jon.  “Yes, he is.”  The next words stick in his throat, and come out in a clump.  “Looking for me.”

“Looking for-“

“My father,” says Jon, sharp and desperate.  “Looking for me.”

Sam is not holding a candle, or he would have dropped it.  His mouth moves, slightly.

“You- your-“  Jon waits.  “Your grace,” Sam finishes, somewhat hollowly.

“Don’t.  Just… don’t.”

Sam hits the floor.

He expects anger.  He expects betrayal.  But no, he realizes.  It is Samwell Tarly who expects betrayal.  Who won’t be angry Jon never trusted him, because it never occurred to him that Jon would’ve trusted him in the first place.

“You’re the prince.  _Jon-_ you’re Queen Lyanna’s son.  You’re-“

“Your brother,” Jon says fiercely.  “I’m your brother.”  _I’m a man of the Night’s Watch.  I’m more of that than I’ve ever been Visenya-who-should-have-been._

-

“Jon?” The distant call jolts them both.  “Jon Snow, I know you’re down here, boy.”

Sam tenses, his eyes flickering about for a better hiding place.  “I’ll draw him off,” he whispers.

But there’s no point.  He can’t hide forever.  He can be dragged out, kicking and screaming, to meet his father like a child.  Or he can stand, and face this.  He can stand, and fight.

Jon shakes his head.  “Thank you,” he whispers back.  “For… everything.”  He clears his thoat, and starts to stand, pulling Sam to his feet beside him.  He has to do this.  He needs to do this.  “I’m in here,” he calls, and steps forward.

Davos Shorthand meets him at the door, his eyes shadowed.  He spares barely a nod for Sam.

“I assume you know why you’re wanted?”

Jon nods.  “Take me to him.”

They walk, somewhat awkwardly, down the corridor, up the slick stairs.  Finally, Jon speaks.

“Did you know?” he asks.

Quick eyes meet his. “You might have tried changing your first name.”

So they have.  All this time.  He can’t imagine a smuggler guessing when a lord’s son didn’t- or, for that matter, Davos keeping a secret from Baratheon.  It wasn’t merit that made him the Lord Commander’s squire after all.  It wasn’t the lack of it that had kept him from ranging.  He’d been a fool to think he could ever stop being a prince.

They take the long route to avoid the courtyard.  Halfway up the winding steps, Shorthand sighs.  “You’ve been a good Watchman.  For what it’s worth.”

Jon tries to think of something to say to that.  “I’m glad you’re alive” doesn’t seem to cut it.  He wonders what being a good Watchman means to a man who never chose this place, who lost everything because of it.  “Thank you,” he says, eventually.  It hangs in the air uselessly.

They open the door.  The Lord Commander nods as they enter, looking even more rigid than usual.  Jon barely notices.

His father stands with his back to them all, clad in far too light a cloak, white hair trailing down his back.  Finally, he turns, and Jon swallows.

Rhaegar’s eyes take him in in an instant, then rake over his companion.  Jon, if it is possible, tenses further.  He had been a quiet child, a good child.  Only rarely- and then only at Dany’s insistence- had he misbehaved.  Only perhaps three times had he been ill-behaved enough to earn his father’s anger.  Rhaegar had never yelled or scolded as his mother did.  He simply drew away until a beating would have seemed preferable to the disappointed disdain.

“Ah, good man,” his father says, almost absently, his eyes still not meeting Jon’s.  “Thank you. …I know you.”  A storyteller never forgets a face.  Rhaegar knows the name of every servant at court.  “The smuggler.  Dav- Davos.  That was it.”  It is his thin smile, the one that doesn’t reach his eyes.    “With the wife at Storm’s End.  You know, she never has remarried.”

There is a cold and burning hatred in Shorthand’s brown eyes.  He does not ask for leave before he slams the door behind him.

“You wanted to see me, your Grace.”  Jon swallows, willing Rhaegar to finally meet his eyes.  “Father.”

-

They walk in silence to Aemon’s wooden keep.  Raven croak above their heads, but Aemon is absent, and so there is nothing, no barrier.

Jon. And his father.

Still Rhaegar says nothing.

Jon will not apologize.  “I am a Brother of the Night’s Watch.  I’ve said my vows.”  And then, from somewhere much smaller: “Is mother-“

Rhaegar bats the question away.  “You ran.  You abandoned family, duty, destiny.  You left us quite the  trail of lies.  If not for your new mother, I might never have found you at all.”

_New mother._   And suddenly a bolt of fear shoots through Jon.  _Not Dany.  Not Dany, who only wanted to be free, who kept my secrets until- until-_   “What have you done, your Grace?”

And suddenly Rhaegar is in another of his mad moods, soft and strange.  “Not you as well, little Jon.  All of them, telling me it’s the dragon blood, the blood of kings and madmen.  Three heads.  Three wives.  Destiny, my son.”

_Destiny_.  Jon’s fists clench.  Always destiny.  Always prophecy. “ _How could you do that to Dany_?”

“Dany?”

“I-“

“My sister is on some mad quest at the moment.  She’s taken her horses to Summerhall.   Dreams, she says, and who am I to argue?”  He looks at Jon, and Jon remembers, suddenly and oddly, that his father loves him.  “I met my third Queen on the Edge of the Shadow.  She says that the darkness is coming.  She says that you stand in the light of bright R’hllor.”

A third queen.  A foreign cultist.  Rhaenys used to sit with Jon, explaining and instructing on proper political marriages.  Rhaenys is unlikely to approve of her “new mother.”  Jon can only wonder on Elia and Lyanna.

_The light of bright R’hllor._

“Father,” says Jon.  “The darkness _is_ coming.  The Others walk.”

Rhaegar’s eyes widen.  “The Others.”  He doesn’t say it with doubt.  He says it as though he’s seen it in his dreams.

“ _This_ is my destiny.  This is where I am meant to be.  I guard the realms of men.”

“A song of ice.”  Jon can barely hear the murmured words.  “A song of fire.”

Jon doesn’t know if he believes in destiny.  But he does believe in the pride on his father’s face.

“Guard them well, my son.”  Rhaegar turns to walk away.  Likely he intends to mount up on his horse without speaking another word.  Jon swallows heavily.

“Wait!”

  -

_(He dreamt, last night.)_

_They had killed his father, and his brother, and his lord commander.  He knows this, but the faces are wrong, are not Rhaegar or Aegon or Stannis Baratheon.  A raven croaks._

_His father’s head sits on a spike, but it is not his father, the dulled eyes are as grey as his own, the hair dark as his own- it is his face, and yet it is his fathers._

_And then the Wildling archer is there instead, her blood as red as her hair, but it is not his sword that killed her._

_“You know nothing nothing nothing Jon Snow.”_

_Her eyes are as red as her blood._

\---

Shorthand has returned to the Lord Commander’s quarters before Jon does.  He and Baratheon are standing, deep in thought over a map of Eastwatch.  Jon’s footsteps alert them.

“You return,” says the Lord Commander.

“I am a brother of the Night’s Watch,” says Jon.  “I’m your squire.”  _I’m home._   “The King will send us men, supplies, and dragonglass for the battle ahead.”

“Will he, now?” asks Shorthand.

“And,” Jon gulps, “Valyrian steel.”  It is a heavy black blade, hand-and-a-half.  A bastard sword.  Jon does not know where or how his father found it, nor why it has been given to him and not to Aegon.  But it sits in his hand as though it was forged for him.

“War is coming.”

Jon nods, and draws Blackfyre.  “We will fight it.”

He will fight it. And he will fight it, here, with Sam and Baratheon and Shorthand.  With his brothers around him.  With destiny, just maybe, on his side.


End file.
